Special characters

[Mike Lewis]

Hi All,

I'm trying to teach myself HTML. One of the tutorials I read points out that you should use certain codes to render "special" characters. For example, if you want a British pound sign (£) on your page, you need to put £ in your code.

No problem. I've just gone through all my pages, changing pound signs, accented letters, etc. in that way.

My question is: What difference does this make? The special characters showed up correctly before I did this, and they still show up correctly.

I've checked my pages in a couple of different browsers, and I see the same behaviour in both. Is this something that affects non-Windows users? Or what?

I'm really only asking out of curiosity. It's no problem using these special codes.

Mike


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Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

My Visual FoxPro site: www.ml-consult.co.uk

 

[Vragabond]

Using the html entities for all the special characters ensures their proper display in every circumstance. Even though using regular characters will appear correct in most browsers most of the time, there are times when, especially with different default encoding types (in browsers you can override the website specified encoding), different operating systems or even different languages of the same operating system.

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[Mike Lewis]

Vragabond,

Thank you for your reply, which is very helpful. I'm obviously going to have to discipline myself to use these special entitities in furture.

I noticed that neither Microsoft FrontPage 2000 nor Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 directly support these special entitites. That is, if you type a special character in design view, the software retains that character in the generated code, rather than substituting the HTML entity. That was partly what was confusing me.

Mike


__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

My Visual FoxPro site: www.ml-consult.co.uk